Equality
This one meanders a little bit.
I realised when I was about 15 that I tended to find women more attractive than my female friends. When they would say, "oh, she's pretty", I'd think, "Damn!" and get this butterflies in my stomach-- the same ones that I would get when I saw a good looking man. I had a huge crush on singer/activist Annie Lennox for many years-- and in some ways, still do. I didn't realise that the other girls I knew didn't find men and women equally sexy, I thought they just didn't say anything.
So, I didn't either. Maybe this wasn't something people said... I mean, I wasn't a lesbian, I knew that, so maybe it was just normal. I was a little confused for a very long time.
Perhaps as long as five years passed before I heard the term "bi-sexual". It might not have been that long, but I can't remember for certain. Once I heard it, and did some google-ing I found women and men just like me! We weren't weird, but we surely weren't "normal" as straight/heterosexuals found it. Our sexuality was more balanced-- some of us are equally attracted to men and woman, some of us are more 60/40 or 70/30 or any numbers you want to use in between.
Time passed, genders fluidly changed, and now we have something called "pansexuality". I am technically a pansexual: I am attracted to the person, their gender doesn't even figure in. I find gender-queer people just as wickedly sexy as a beautiful woman is, or a good looking man, or a beautiful transperson. It's the person, not their equipment that gets my butterflies going, and that kick in the guts that make your hormones turn on, your pheromones start flittering and your heart start skipping.
Not everyone understands that. I have had to explain to lesbians, gay men, straight people; it doesn't compute to people who are only attracted to one gender. The huge, all-encompassing sexuality of a pan/bisexual is hard for us to explain, let alone someone who doesn't think that way.
I hate to use "think" because it's not all in our heads, it's in our guts and our spirits, too. Just like the sexuality of a straight person, or a lesbian-- there's something under our skins that makes us tick, right? Something inside, that's part brains, part spirit, part, I don't even know.
Sexuality is weird like that.
We can barely define it, really. What is "straight", what's "gay"? It's more than the thing that makes us sexually attracted to another person. It's less than "just straight sex". It's something so nebulous that it barely had a name before 1900.
Underneath all of it, it's humanity, though. Under the skin of it, behind the tendons, it's our humanity. We are, just because we are.
That's why I've always worked for equal rights for everyone. Even before I knew I wasn't "straight", even before I had a name for my sexuality, my orientation, I knew equality was right, for everyone.
How could I be so cruel, to take away the rights of other people?
How could I pretend that I was better, because I could "pass" as straight?
I've been told by straight people that my orientation is a phase I'm going through. I've been told by lesbians that I need to just come out, and stop pretending. Unfortunately due to the animosity for homosexuality, bisexuality is often a stop-off for lesbians and gay men as they negotiate their own orientation from heterosexual. This is terrible! Not for us bis, but for anyone who can't be themselves.
I do know, some people think they might be bi, but as they grow and evolve into themselves, they find they are not. That's fine too. So long as they're not annoying girls making "duck face" in bars and smooching me so their boyfriend gets a hard on over it. That pisses me off.
Equality means "everyone is the same".
Equality means "If I can get married, so can you. If I can raise kids, so can you. If I am a person, then you are too!"
Equality means throwing a fit at my reps and governor, seems like it's a weekly basis, telling them to overturn the travesty of legislation they passed before I got here, writing discrimination into our state constitution.
Equality means "I care about you, because you're you! You're human, your orientation doesn't even figure in to how I feel about you."
I don't see LGBT people are less, or secondary. I see them as people.
I know part of it's being one. I am bisexual. I am the B in the LGBT.
I've been working for equality for a long time. I'm glad to see Washington state joined the 21st Century and legalised marital equality. I was so excited for them! I wrote a congratulations letter to their state Senate, and Governor!
I also wrote my own Governor, and told her it was a shame that we couldn't celebrate with them. That Arizona is so backwoods and pathetic, so stuck in the middle ages, so beholden to the Catholic and Mormon churches that we can't even have equality under the law. That we can't even have equality under the 14th Amendment. I told her it was repulsive, but I wasn't leaving! I'm staying here, working to make the law fair, equitable, and these moronic, disgusting, bizarrely religions people won't stop me. They can't! If they did, then I'd be abandoning my principles, my self, my faith, my everything.
I'm not the only one.
There are millions like me. Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Straight Allies, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Androgynous. We're everywhere!
And we're not leaving.
I realised when I was about 15 that I tended to find women more attractive than my female friends. When they would say, "oh, she's pretty", I'd think, "Damn!" and get this butterflies in my stomach-- the same ones that I would get when I saw a good looking man. I had a huge crush on singer/activist Annie Lennox for many years-- and in some ways, still do. I didn't realise that the other girls I knew didn't find men and women equally sexy, I thought they just didn't say anything.
So, I didn't either. Maybe this wasn't something people said... I mean, I wasn't a lesbian, I knew that, so maybe it was just normal. I was a little confused for a very long time.
Perhaps as long as five years passed before I heard the term "bi-sexual". It might not have been that long, but I can't remember for certain. Once I heard it, and did some google-ing I found women and men just like me! We weren't weird, but we surely weren't "normal" as straight/heterosexuals found it. Our sexuality was more balanced-- some of us are equally attracted to men and woman, some of us are more 60/40 or 70/30 or any numbers you want to use in between.
Time passed, genders fluidly changed, and now we have something called "pansexuality". I am technically a pansexual: I am attracted to the person, their gender doesn't even figure in. I find gender-queer people just as wickedly sexy as a beautiful woman is, or a good looking man, or a beautiful transperson. It's the person, not their equipment that gets my butterflies going, and that kick in the guts that make your hormones turn on, your pheromones start flittering and your heart start skipping.
Not everyone understands that. I have had to explain to lesbians, gay men, straight people; it doesn't compute to people who are only attracted to one gender. The huge, all-encompassing sexuality of a pan/bisexual is hard for us to explain, let alone someone who doesn't think that way.
I hate to use "think" because it's not all in our heads, it's in our guts and our spirits, too. Just like the sexuality of a straight person, or a lesbian-- there's something under our skins that makes us tick, right? Something inside, that's part brains, part spirit, part, I don't even know.
Sexuality is weird like that.
We can barely define it, really. What is "straight", what's "gay"? It's more than the thing that makes us sexually attracted to another person. It's less than "just straight sex". It's something so nebulous that it barely had a name before 1900.
Underneath all of it, it's humanity, though. Under the skin of it, behind the tendons, it's our humanity. We are, just because we are.
That's why I've always worked for equal rights for everyone. Even before I knew I wasn't "straight", even before I had a name for my sexuality, my orientation, I knew equality was right, for everyone.
How could I be so cruel, to take away the rights of other people?
How could I pretend that I was better, because I could "pass" as straight?
I've been told by straight people that my orientation is a phase I'm going through. I've been told by lesbians that I need to just come out, and stop pretending. Unfortunately due to the animosity for homosexuality, bisexuality is often a stop-off for lesbians and gay men as they negotiate their own orientation from heterosexual. This is terrible! Not for us bis, but for anyone who can't be themselves.
I do know, some people think they might be bi, but as they grow and evolve into themselves, they find they are not. That's fine too. So long as they're not annoying girls making "duck face" in bars and smooching me so their boyfriend gets a hard on over it. That pisses me off.
Equality means "everyone is the same".
Equality means "If I can get married, so can you. If I can raise kids, so can you. If I am a person, then you are too!"
Equality means throwing a fit at my reps and governor, seems like it's a weekly basis, telling them to overturn the travesty of legislation they passed before I got here, writing discrimination into our state constitution.
Equality means "I care about you, because you're you! You're human, your orientation doesn't even figure in to how I feel about you."
I don't see LGBT people are less, or secondary. I see them as people.
I know part of it's being one. I am bisexual. I am the B in the LGBT.
I've been working for equality for a long time. I'm glad to see Washington state joined the 21st Century and legalised marital equality. I was so excited for them! I wrote a congratulations letter to their state Senate, and Governor!
I also wrote my own Governor, and told her it was a shame that we couldn't celebrate with them. That Arizona is so backwoods and pathetic, so stuck in the middle ages, so beholden to the Catholic and Mormon churches that we can't even have equality under the law. That we can't even have equality under the 14th Amendment. I told her it was repulsive, but I wasn't leaving! I'm staying here, working to make the law fair, equitable, and these moronic, disgusting, bizarrely religions people won't stop me. They can't! If they did, then I'd be abandoning my principles, my self, my faith, my everything.
I'm not the only one.
There are millions like me. Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Straight Allies, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Androgynous. We're everywhere!
And we're not leaving.
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